“I escaped physically, I haven’t escaped psychologically,” says Shin Dong-hyuk. His remarkable journey out of a deadly North Korean prison to freedom is chronicled in Escape from Camp 14 by Blaine Harden. Shin didn’t escape for freedom. He had little knowledge of such a concept. He had heard that outside the prison, and especially outside North Korea, meat was available to eat.

Shin was born at Camp 14 in 1982 and was strictly forbidden to leave because of the sins of his family line against the state. His crime? Long before his birth, some of his relatives defected to South Korea. He was constantly told he could repent of his sins for hard labor and hunger. “Enemies of class, whoever they are, their seed must be eliminated through three generations,” declared Supreme Leader Kim Il Sung in 1972. Before his escape, Hardin summed up Shin’s prison experience:
Read more on One Man’s Great Escape from North Korea…

The horrific factory collapse in Bangladesh, now surpassing 1,100 in total deaths, has caused many to ponder how we might prevent such tragedies in the future, leading to plenty of ideological introspection about economic development and free trade.

Describing the situation as “neither too simple nor too complex,” Brian Dijkema encourages a healthy mix of confidence and caution. With folks calling for the complete take-down of global capitalism on one end and elevating stiff pro-market arguments on the other, Dijkema reminds us that we should respond, first and foremost, to the simple “brutality of death,” with clarity, prayer, and compassion.

Yet when it comes to understanding the drivers of the disaster, we should recognize the complexity of things. Responding to Pope Francis’s corresponding critique of profit-driven business decisions, Dijkema warns that by “conflating what is complex into what is simple or vice-versa,” we risk dishonoring the “dignity of the human person” and “the dignity of labour.”

Over at Ethika Politika, Andrew Haines places a similar emphasis on complexity, focusing on an argument free-market advocates routinely make in response to such circumstances:

If you know a free market champion, then you’ve heard the argument that low-wage, low-skill, mostly mindless jobs are better than no jobs at all. The idea works well in theory. I admit, I’ve even made the case myself from time to time.

On the other hand, you might have heard recently about things like the collapse of an industrial building in Savar, Bangladesh—home to five garment factories—where the death toll recently topped one thousand.

I say “on the other hand” since the any-job-is-better-than-no-job argument (AJBNJ) works well, until it doesn’t.

Haines proceeds to offer what I think is a fair critique of the any-job-is-better-than-no-job maxim (AJBNJ), arguing that it “suffers a huge blind spot when it comes to connecting ‘better’ economics with ‘better” humanity.’” Read more on The Bangladesh Factory Collapse and the Messiness of Economic Development…

Those who’ve attended Acton University in the past know that the Evening Speakers are memorable, uplifting and often the highlight of the day for many. This year, one speaker is Marina Nemat, currently teaching at the University of Toronto. Nemat is set to speak on her book, Prisoner of Tehran. The memoir details her imprisonment, with a life sentence, at age 16 in the notorious Evin Prison in Tehran during the Khomeini Regime.

While the memoir, by its nature, is extremely personal, it touches on the themes of religious and intellectual liberty that are foundational to the learning at Acton University. In fact, Nemat was imprisoned for the “crime” of asking her calculus teacher to teach calculus, rather than spouting the politics of the regime. Her request led to her fellow students walking out of class, and Nemat found herself accused of communist and anti-revolutionary activities.

Part of the memoir focuses on Nemat’s Christian faith, a faith passed on to her from her Russian grandmother. While Nemat’s parents were distant emotionally, her grandmother was a source of strength for Nemat, especially as Nemat grew to learn that her grandparents had survived the Russian revolution. Read more on Acton University Evening Speaker Marina Nemat: ‘Prisoner Of Tehran’…

Pope warns comfortable living causes ‘gentrification of the heart’
Francis X. Rocca, Catholic News Service

Pope Francis warned against “gentrification of the heart” as a consequence of comfortable living, and called on the faithful to “touch the flesh of Christ” by caring for the needy.

Read more on PowerLinks – 05.14.13…

Not content to trample only the religious freedom side of the First Amendment, the federal government has decided to ignore the free speech side too.

As the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) reports, the U.S. Departments of Justice and Education have joined together to mandate that virtually every college and university in the United States establish unconstitutional speech codes that violate the First Amendment and decades of legal precedent.

In a letter sent yesterday to the University of Montana that explicitly states that it is intended as “a blueprint for colleges and universities throughout the country,” the Departments of Justice and Education have mandated a breathtakingly broad definition of sexual harassment that makes virtually every student in the United States a harasser while ignoring the First Amendment. The mandate applies to every college receiving federal funding—virtually every American institution of higher education nationwide, public or private.

The letter states that “sexual harassment should be more broadly defined as ‘any unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature’” including “verbal conduct” (that is, speech). It then explicitly states that allegedly harassing expression need not even be offensive to an “objectively reasonable person of the same gender in the same situation”—if the listener takes offense to sexually related speech for any reason, no matter how irrationally or unreasonably, the speaker may be punished.

Eugene Volokh, a law professor at UCLA School of Law, says that this is telling universities to institute speech codes:
Read more on Obama Administration Orders Colleges to Implement Unconstitutional Speech Codes…

I’m a contributor to this month’s edition of Cato Unbound, on the topic of “Conservative-Libertarian Fusionism.”

The forum consists of four lead essays from the panelists followed by ad hoc discussion. The first four essays are up:

Read more on Cato Unbound: Conservative-Libertarian Fusionism…

Anyone who’s been to Detroit in recent years knows it’s a mess. Acres and acres of abandoned houses, a population decline of 25% in the past 10 years, an astronomical crime rate, and the city is literally leaking money to the tune of some $200 million in two months. Back in March, Gov. Rick Snyder appointed bankruptcy attorney Kevyn Orr as the city’s emergency financial manager, and Orr has just released his report on the city’s financial state.

Before we begin weeping about the death of the Motor City, there are bright spots. Fast Company did a piece in April highlighting entrepreneurs who are taking advantage of low-rent and housing prices and the need for creative work to boost Detroit’s economy. Dan Gilbert is a real estate broker working on filling office space downtown. Andy Didorosi has created a bus service that takes patrons from night-spot to night-spot in safe, fun and comfortable buses. Alicia George has opened a coffee house, and is optimistic that several new businesses have opened near-by.

Now for the bad news. The city of Detroit is paying a farrier (that’s a person who shoes horses) $56,000 in pay and benefits. Right now, in 2013. Let’s just say that he’s not really earning his pay in today’s downtown Detroit. The Detroit Water & Sewer Department is telling the cash-strapped city they need more employees – union employees. And the city’s unionized teachers? They want to cash in unused sick days for over $14 million. Read more on Shoeing Horses in Detroit: How Unions Are Hindering A City’s Revival…

Michael J. Gerson’s encomium to Jim Wallis’ book on the common good includes this curious paragraph:

Nearly every Christian tradition of social ethics encompasses two sorts of justice. The first is procedural justice: giving people what they deserve under contracts and the law. The second is distributive justice: meeting some needs just because human beings are human beings. This is not the same thing as egalitarianism; confiscation is not compassion. But distributive justice requires a decent provision for the vulnerable and destitute. And this is not just a matter of personal charity. Social justice is more than crumbs from the table; it depends on the existence of social and economic conditions that allow people to live, work and thrive.

Gerson should be applauded for grappling with such substantive doctrines as the common good and social justice. It is certainly brave to do so within the confines of a short opinion piece.

But his treatment of these in the context of this short op-ed illustrate the difficulty of doing so in a responsible fashion. For one thing, the common good is perhaps one of the most difficult concepts to get a handle on in the history of Christian moral reflection. In the end, Gerson summarizes it as “the set of social circumstances that allows everyone to flourish.” We might quibble with this description as not quite getting at the common good as a telos rather than a process, but given that he quotes John Paul II in the previous line, this isn’t that large of a quibble.

We might also note that even though it is commonly associated with modern Roman Catholic social thought, as Gerson notes, the idea of the common good is much more of a catholic legacy of Christianity shared by a variety of Christian traditions. See, for instance, Gerson’s claim that Wallis’ invocation of the common good is “further evidence of the intellectual advance of Catholic social teaching across Christian confessions.” I think this is probably true in the case of Wallis and many evangelicals, and in this Roman Catholic social thought has done a great service in preserving this inheritance and serving as a reminder and inspiration for those who have forgotten the place of the common good in their own tradition’s moral reflection.
Read more on Gerson on the Common Good…

When I was a young Marine I learned that when the commanding officer says, “I wish” or “I desire,” these expressions have the force of a direct order and should be acted upon as if they had given a direct order. If our CO were to say, even in musing to themselves, “I wish there was something that could be done about that,” we knew we should jump into action. But what sort of action was called for? And should we get clarification before proceeding on our own? The peculiar custom always struck me as open to misunderstanding and abuse.

Sometimes a leader doesn’t even need to be so direct as to say “I wish” or “I desire” for subordinates to get them impression that their boss wants them to take action. A prime example is the latest political scandal in which the Internal Revenue Service admitted that some of their employees had singled out nonprofit applicants with the terms “Tea Party” or “patriots” in their titles. As Ross Douthat says, “the bureaucrats in question probably thought they were just doing their patriotic duty, and giving dangerous extremists the treatment they deserved.”

Where might an enterprising, public-spirited I.R.S. agent get the idea that a Tea Party group deserved more scrutiny from the government than the typical band of activists seeking tax-exempt status? Oh, I don’t know: why, maybe from all the prominent voices who spent the first two years of the Obama era worrying that the Tea Party wasn’t just a typically messy expression of citizen activism, but something much darker — an expression of crypto-fascist, crypto-racist rage, part Timothy McVeigh and part Bull Connor, potentially carrying a wave of terrorist violence in its wings.

Some conspiratorial minded people will assume the actions of the IRS employees had to have come from direct orders from their superiors. But I think a simpler, more indirect phenomenon, like what Douthat presents, better explains such situations. Rather than attributing it to a “conspiracy theory” I’d say it is a version of what I’d call a “confederacy theory”:
Read more on The IRS and the Tea Party: A Confederacy Theory…

Cronyism, competition, and finance: A discussion with Cliff Asness
AEI Ideas

After providing a definition of cronyism, Asness offered an explanation for the growth of cronyism today, which is rooted in the increasing size and scope of government. Only by limiting government’s growth can we limit opportunities for cronyism, Asness argued.

Read more on PowerLinks – 05.13.13…